Brandishing red flares and chanting “Free Palestine!” on the night of October 17, dozens of dockworkers in Piraeus, the largest port in Greece, blocked a container with 21 tons of ammunition from being loaded aboard the ship Marla Bull, bound for Haifa, Israel, then to be deployed in the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. The workers spray-painted the message “Murderers Out of the Port” on the container.

The action was carried out by the Union of Dock Workers, ENEDEP, which had voted at a general assembly the night before to stop the cargo. Speaking to the night shift workers at the port, ENEDEP president Markos Bekris said, “We will not permit the transport of war material that will continue the genocide of the Palestinian people.” He added, “We refuse to let the port of Piraeus be used as a war base,” and demanded an end to Greek participation in the war.

As news spread and more and more people flocked to the port, the dock workers and supporters stood behind the union banner proclaiming “Freedom for Palestine! NATO is a Killer.” The Union of Metal Workers of Attica and the Shipbuilding Industry, the Labor Centre of Piraeus and other organizations also participated in the action, as well as a representative of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU).

The shipment was in transit from North Macedonia, which joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2020, and has since sought to be useful to the imperialist military alliance by supplying munitions to Zionist Israel and to Ukraine in NATO’s proxy war against Russia. The Marla Bull is owned by the Israeli ZIM lines and is flagged in the Pacific Ocean statelet of Marshall Islands, a nominally independent U.S. protectorate that provides a “flag of convenience” for major shippers.

The dock union ENEDEP is affiliated with PAME (the All Workers Militant Front), the labor federation associated with the Greek Communist Party (KKE), as are the other unions that participated in the blocking action. PAME immediately posted on X proclaiming, “WE DID IT!” and “WORKERS HAVE THE POWER!” Its statement said, “We will not stain our hands with the blood of the people,” and highlighted that the ship was forced to depart without the death cargo.

In an article hailing the action, the KKE daily newspaper Rizospastis (19-20 October) quoted PGFTU delegate Mohamed Iqnaibi, who told the workers that “from your struggles, your support and solidarity we draw strength and courage, until victory. We thank the Greek dock workers.” PAME posted videos of the action here and here.

This is not the first time Greek dock workers have stopped a ship carrying war cargo to Israel. On June 14, as reports circulated that the MSC Altair loaded with military materiel for the Zionist war on Gaza was nearing the port, the ENEDEP warned: “Dockworkers in Piraeus declare that we will not in any way agree to unload the ship at any pier, from one end of the port to the other…. Do not dare to dock the ship at the port of Piraeus” (Rizospastis, 15 June).

Moreover, in 2022 and 2023, KKE-led workers stopped rail shipments of arms for Ukraine heading north from the Aegean Sea port of Alexandroupolis. Now they have done it again: on November 6, in the town of Tyrnavos in central Greece, demonstrators from the KKE and its youth group, KNE, blocked a convoy of trucks carrying ammunition and rockets from a nearby weapons depot to the Zelensky puppet regime in Ukraine.

As they blocked the caravan, forcing it to turn back, demonstrators chanted “No land and water for the murderers of the people,” “NATO out of Greece,” and they painted “NATO killers go home” on the trucks with red paint. The Communist Party mayor spoke to the demonstration, saying “The people of Tyrnavos, with their militant traditions, … will not allow death cargos to pass through the city, will not allow the further involvement of the country in the imperialist slaughterhouse” (KKE, 8 November).

The Greek workers’ refusal to handle war materiel is an exemplary demonstration of what is crucially necessary – workers action – to stop the ongoing U.S./Israeli butchery of the Palestinian people. With almost 50,000 Gazans officially registered killed, and total deaths likely double that number; with 90% of the Gaza population (over 2,000,000 people) displaced and almost 100% facing hunger; with the Israeli military and fascistic settlers rampaging on the West Bank, and now with over 3,500 people killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and more than one million displaced, all the talk of “ceasefires” or negotiations, by both imperialist governments and “peace movement” organizers, are a fraud, to divert protest.

From the beginning of this barbaric onslaught, the League for the Fourth International and its national sections have called on the labor movement to defend the Palestinians and to defeat the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza.¹ In our press and at every demonstration, we have called for workers action tostop the shipment of arms to Israel, as we have also done over the NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. We publicized a PGFTU appeal for union action in a special May Day supplement in English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.²

Already in October 2023, the PGFTU – Gaza called on labor internationally to take action to “refuse to build weapons for Israel,” “refuse to transport weapons to Israel,” “pass motions in their trade unions” to that effect, etc. In Africa, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest union on the continent, dedicated its May Day actions “to the struggle of the people of Palestine.” At its initiative, the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) Africa regional conference called on “all ITF affiliates to support workers refusing to handle goods linked to Israel’s occupation.”

In the United States, thanks to the efforts of Class Struggle Workers – Portland (CSWP), five unions in the Portland, Oregon area – IUPAT Local 10 (painters), Ironworkers Local 29 (structural steel), IBEW Local 48 (electrical workers), AFT Local 111 (educational workers) and Carpenters Local 503 – passed resolutions calling for labor action to stop the shipment of arms to Israel, for the immediate end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, for Israel to get out of Gaza and the West Bank, and to end all arming of Israel now.³

The NUMSA May Day resolution highlighted the actions of the International Longshore and Warehouse union (ILWU) against Israeli ships in previous Zionist wars, as well as against the apartheid regime in South Africa. In keeping with their tradition, on May 1 ILWU Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay area, unanimously adopted a resolution “to refuse to handle military cargo to Israel,” and to “honor picket lines protesting the war on Gaza, as we have done repeatedly in the past.” However, this hard-hitting resolution was defeated by the union bureaucracy at the ILWU’s convention in June.

Meanwhile, on the eve of the brief (three-day) strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) that shut down East and Gulf Coast U.S. ports at the beginning of October, the grandstanding ILA president Harold Dagget issued a disgusting statement declaring that “ILA, the ‘I LOVE AMERICA’ Union, will Maintain its Longstanding Pledge to Handle Military Cargo During Strike.”

In Europe, several unions have issued statements declaring their refusal to transport military cargo to Israel, including transport workers in Belgium and dock workers in Barcelona, Spain.  However, these have largely remained paper resolutions without much actual implementation, leading the PGFTU-Gaza to complain, in its March 2024 appeal, of the “shocking silence and neglect by the international labor movement.” Worse still, in Germany the metal workers union, IG Metall, has shamefully pushed production and export of arms to Israel and Ukraine.

The exceptions, noted by the Palestinian unions, are Italy, where combative “rank-and-file” unions have shut down the ports of Genova and Livorno, refusing to load military cargo for Israel, brought tens of thousands of workers into the streets and twice carrying out one-day national strikes (February 24 and June 25) in solidarity with the Palestinians. Mexican workers in the state of Puebla recorded a video saluting these actions by the militant Italian unions. The mainstream labor federations (CGIL/UIL/CISL) have, however, done nothing.

And Greece, where as reported above, workers and leftists have blocked arms shipments to the NATO war against Russia over Ukraine and the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. The KKE has a pronounced social-patriotic outlook, vociferously defending Greek “sovereignty” (against Turkey over Aegean islands, for example) and refuses to defend Russia against the NATO proxy war over Ukraine, which amounts to a capitulation to imperialism. But unlike many opportunist leftists elsewhere in Europe, who adopt a hands-off “neutral” policy in order to tail along after the pro-Ukraine, pro-imperialist “peace movement,” the Greek Communist Party at least carries out concrete actions against the imperialists and Zionists.

The slaughter of Palestinians continues. What is to be done? As shown by the actions of militant unions and leftists in Italy and Greece, and the failure or outright refusal by “mainstream” unions and labor federations pretty much everywhere to act against this bloodbath, the fight for class-struggle workers action must be part of a broader battle against the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy. The program of this “labor aristocracy,” as Lenin called it, is that of class collaboration, reflecting their ever-greater integration into the imperialist state. Against this, as the League for the Fourth International has underlined, militant class struggle requires the leadership of a revolutionary proletarian vanguard based on the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky.

Stopping a container of ammo to Israel, a convoy of war cargo to Ukraine, a one-day strike or port shutdown – these are first steps, but they are vital in pointing the direction that struggle must take. While calls on governments to declare an arms embargo on Israel (as well as calls for “boycott, divestment, sanctions”) aim at pressuring the imperialists, mostly in vain, class-struggle workers action advances on the road to bringing down the capitalist-imperialist system. As the imperialists hurtle toward a thermonuclear World War III, the struggle against their deadly rule – which produces endless war, poverty, racism and the other social blights besetting humanity – can only be won through international socialist revolution. ■